Category Archives: Technology

Do you ever open Facebook or Instagram to check a few posts and end up scrolling for way too long? Facebook outlined some new features coming to Facebook and Instagram that will help prevent just that. In a meeting, Facebook showed up off dashboards coming to the two social media apps that will let you keep track of how much time you have actually spent using the apps each day.

If the dashboard is not enough, there are a couple of other new features that could help you keep your social media usage under control. If you are the type of person to lose track of time when you are going through posts or photos, you will also have the option to set a time limit for yourself. After you have used the app for that specified amount of time an alert will pop up to let you know. Additionally, if you constantly feel bombarded with notifications throughout the day, you will be able to mute them for several hours.

How will this affect Facebook’s short-term growth?

By making it easier for Facebook and Instagram users to stay aware of their usage on the two widely popular apps, Facebook could be putting their growth in jeopardy. If people are using Facebook less often, for example, the marketing companies that pay Facebook to advertise on the service will have less data to work with.

Financially, Facebook has already been having a rough few months. By helping people spend less time on their apps, Facebook might lose both money and users when the new features are rolled out to everyone.

How will this affect Facebook’s long-term growth?

There is no denying that social media addiction is a growing concern. A lot of people are starting to realize just how easy it is to spend hours a day checking posts and interacting on social media platforms. Mark Zuckerberg has expressed a desire to shift towards focusing more on the quality of the interactions on Facebook’s services, rather than total time spent per user. These new Facebook and Instagram features could help people make their social media usage more meaningful, and if it does, users may start to view the two apps in a more positive light.

When computer problems occur in this day and age, they have the potential to bring entire operations grinding to a halt.

Productivity Costs

Imagine how much productivity is lost during a 30 minute Internet outage, then add up the outages that have occurred in a business throughout the year and there are bound to be major gaps in output. Simply put, it’s better for business when an IT department is efficiently run.

If you employ people for your business, there’s a lot to take into consideration. If you pay them by the hour, one of your main points of interest is probably how many hours they spend working for you. This is when the right kind of time machine can come in handy.

Of course, in today’s work, it’s often the case that you never see your actual employees. If you run an online business, they could be working for you on the other side of the world. But with online time tracking, you can be rest assured that you know when they’re clocking in, clocking out and how long they’re working.

While this is often helpful when it comes to assessing the qualities of your employees, it’s essential when it comes time to pay them. You need a tracking application that is reliable and makes the actual payment process a breeze.

There’s no shortage of what online resources can do in terms of tracking your employee’s hours. Therefore, you should only consider software that also makes it easy to see, at a glance, when your employees missed work, clocked in late, left early, etc. Hopefully, these aren’t issues you deal with often, but this is still a nice benefit to have.

Just because you have employees who aren’t working right in front of you doesn’t mean you can’t keep an eye on their time. Utilize the right online option for time-tracking and the process is no problem.

As a business owner, marketing is one of the most valuable and expensive tools that can be utilized to help grow a business. Marketing contains many different branches and opportunities, from newspaper articles to street advertisements to television commercials.

These all differ in the people they reach, how they market to them, and in price.

With the advent and consumerism of the Internet, a new field has evolved, and it has changed the scope of marketing. From marketing a television commercial that reaches millions of people to only reaching a few thousand, how marketing is produced and consumed has dramatically shifted. It has thus created a problem for business owners- where should my money go- into traditional marketing or into new age marketing?

The answer to this question is dependent on the business and their customers. If the product is generic, and can work for many different people or is in need by many different customer profiles, then traditional marketing might work best for the company. However, if the product is specific and narrowed down to a very definitive type of customer, for example, wealthy, middle aged, woman who is healthy and interested in beauty products and care- this would require a more direct marketing plan to be effective.

Here are some details and pros and cons on each of these marketing paths:

Traditional:

This includes newspapers, television, radio announcements, or any other type of media that broadcasts to large numbers of people. Here, the quantity of viewers outweighs the specificity of the ad, because the product can appeal to most people.

Pros:

-Reaches the largest audience it can

-Focus is on the product

-Can be affordable enough to fit the business’ marketing budget

Cons:

-Unable to get customer/viewer feedback

-Is difficult to stay current with constant changing trends

-Repetitive- could bore potential clients

New Media:

This includes interactive advertisements online that entice the customer to view the ad in another window or allow the client to be redirected to the business’ website. This ranges from banner ads at the top of an internet page to display advertisements on the side bar of a webpage.

Pros:

-Developed with a specific target audience in mind, and only shown to that audience, which greatly increases ROI

-Able to be changed and replaced with a new ad very quickly

-Interacts with the audience, and allows the business to get immediate feedback from potential customers

In this modern age, nothing facilitates strengthened e-commerce and online sales volume the way online credit card merchant accounts can. With secure online credit card facilities, you and your business will see increased business revenues brought about by fast, reliable, and hassle-free payment systems that allow you to accept credit cards from all over the world. Use the power of secure online servers to help increase the speed and reliability of credit card payments and allow your customers to shop quicker, safer, and easier than ever before. With a reliable system enabling your business to accept payments as easily as swiping a card – or receiving card information – your customers will enjoy this newfound convenience in payment.

Display advertising has become crucial to business, and is one of the fastest growing channels in Internet marketing. It’s one of the most effective methods to increase leads from inbound marketing efforts, offering marketers a plethora of tools to track and test their offers. Having an understand of how inbound marketing works, including the most beneficial methods to use it, will help you find new channels to advertise and draw in more leads.

Optimization

Optimization can refer to either your website or your display advertising. It’s the practice of improving your website’s ability to engage the user, and includes many elements. For instance, optimization is used in search marketing to highlight certain key terms. In CPM advertising, it is used to improve the chances for a conversion to occur. Usually, you would optimize content above the fold (the halfway point of a Web page). You might also consider optimizing the headline, which is typically the first thing a user sees.

Optimization can also refer to the speed with which elements load on a website. This is crucial to banner advertising as you will be charged when the tracking pixel fires, regardless of whether the user sees your content. Faster page load times decrease the chances of poorly reported click data.

Content

The content of a website is what influences the user and the ad. Content reflects user intent, but it also determines what ads are relevant. Sites are usually organized by a particular theme, which is broad and over reaching like “tech” or “politics.” From there, the site usually has a specialty, like mobile tech or liberal news.

When you buy traffic from a buy-side platform, and you designate demographic targeting, the platform may use the content of the Web page (along with some backend statistical data) to determine whether your ad and the audience would be a good fit. Of course, bidding also plays a role, but it becomes easier to bid on a particular demographic once you understand more about what its audience is doing.

Final Thoughts

Understanding more about how the elements of marketing work together will impact your bottom line. Once you know the kind of content your audience reads, and how to optimize your ads to reach them, you will see an increase in conversions.